Social Networks

Every morning, I go to my RSS reader and pull out a few tasty chunks of content: usually about ten out of 500 or so items. I open each in a tab in my browser, then I go through the list and decide what to do with each of them.

This morning, three of my nine tasty content chunks were about Facebook. And I decided that I should post them here:

I’d like to be able to import RSS feeds and post items to a group’s page. Sharing content with people who share your interests is one of the best features of Facebook and it should be extended to interest groups.

When I was first getting into social networks, I noticed that a lot of people I knew had hundreds, even thousands of “friends.” I asked one girlfriend about how she knew all those people and she explained that a lot of them were just random strangers. This was especially true on MySpace.

Apparently, the number of people you count as cyber “friends” is a metric of your popularity. For many, it’s a manifestation of the same phenomenon that leads people to conduct smear campaigns before prom court is announced in high school.

Having never been terribly popular in school — hard to believe, I know, but true — I was pretty much oblivious to this phenomenon. Until recently, the only people I was friends with on Facebook were folks that I had met in real life. Since then, Robert Scoble has convinced me that it’s alright to friend — it’s a verb now — all comers. It’s a good way to reach out to your readers. Robert uses his Facebook as a hub to organize the copious content he produces all over the Web.

This raises a lot of questions about privacy and control over personal information. But those issues aside, it also brings us back to the hyper-friending phenomenon:

The Sydney Morning Herald proudly proclaims Facebook to be an office time-waster that costs Australian business $5bn annually:

Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said.

The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia.

Needless to say, that’s playing fast and loose with the numbers. Of course the article goes on to quote Office Space-like employees who “averaged about 15 minutes of work per day,” (though, interestingly enough, this particular person doesn’t credit Facebook for her off-time).

Internet time-wasting is no doubt something that’s here, and should be kept in check, but this story smells a little bit like hyperbole to me.

Yes, there’s unproductive time spent on Facebook. Of all the social networks, it is the most college-oriented, and college is famous for nothing if not procrastination. But experiments have shown that a little bit of time spent engaging on Facebook can lead to some incredible ROI, or some great community and awareness building.

If you’re in the business of having customers (get it? that’s everyone), don’t be so quick to write Facebook off as the devil. If your team is on Facebook, chances are your customers are, too. Don’t throw that connection away if you don’t have to.

If you’ve ever spent some constructive time on Facebook, leave a story or a link in the comments (I know you’ve got at least one, Jeremiah).

As people have wisely cautioned, however, a little access to feeds doesn’t mean that the platform is “open” yet, nor is it likely to be as open as some would like in the near future. But it is a sign that the people running Facebook are still trying to make something that people can use, instead of something that traps them into it.

On the internet, being able to use something means being able to pair it with as many of the hundreds of other services out there. Facebook status messages and Twitter. Facebook tags, Technorati Tags, FlickR search. The list goes on.

I’m interested to see what happens as Facebook grows more and more into a platform within the web (the web OS?), but in the meantime, I’m going to go subscribe to some feeds.

The social utility Facebook anounced today that iPhone users can quickly flip through their Facebook contacts in an EDGE-compatible, easy-view application at iPhone.Facebook.com.

The “geeky, soon-to-be-loaded executives of Facebook” — as Steven Levy so aptly called them in this week’s Newsweek cover story — may not always listen to their users. But with this newest development, they have hit a home run.

This move reveals the big strategy in Facebook’s effort to remain eternally relevant. They are trying to become the “Facebook Killer” rather than letting a new service come along and siphon off all their early adopters. To keep those early adopters — a.k.a. people who use Facebook and would spend $650 on a 1.0 phone from Apple — happy, they’ve launched a widget that will keep us engaged with Facebook longer.

Bravo!

Update: Here are some other sites with great insight on the Facebook for iPhone:

Over the past week and a half, Steve and I have given several PRWeb sponsored Webinars on monitoring the online buzz via RSS. Toward the end of our latter two talks, I got into how you can bring your Google Reader shared items feed into Facebook with this nifty little widget by Mario Romero.

As soon as I started showing the inside of Facebook, a bunch of questions came in from participants who wanted to know all about the difference between Facebook and MySpace. I told them that they’d drilled down into one of my big biases, which is namely that Facebook kicks MySpace’s patoot.

It seems like every marketer and their mama wants to understand social networking systems. This is the main theme of the commentary on Sean Bonner’s great article responding to danah boyd’s article on the class differences between Facebook and MySpace.

[Please note that Bonner's article may not be entirely safe for work, or even open behind some office firewalls. This is because it's hosted at SuicideGirls.com, which purveys high-art pornographic images alongside social commentary and discussion.]

My short answer to our webinar attendees was that marketers are remiss not to have profiles on both sites. But I think that Facebook is stronger overall for business networking.

What do you think? Have you used MySpace or Facebook for business? What have the results been?

There’s an article (I almost called it a post – silly me) about Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who started Facebook, at the Economist.com that Teresa kindly pointed me to this morning. It’s an interesting summary of the Facebook phenomenon, if you’re not familiar with it.

But the part that caught my attention was one line right near the end:

Advertising, the obvious business model, does not seem to work well on Facebook, perhaps because people go there to socialise, not to shop.